A Points South essay from the North Carolina Music Issue. Shortly after publishing the biography John Coltrane: His Life and Music, Lewis Porter received a letter from a man who identified himself as a Coltrane. Only not, presumably, one related…by
Benjamin Hedin |
Nov, 2018

A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue. When it snows, the entire post shuts down like there is no war going on. Perhaps the higher-ups decide to let those left behind, for the moment, savor the chance to shape snowmen with their children or lie…by
Zachary Lunn |
Nov, 2018

A feature essay from the North Carolina Music Issue. Rapsody now dons the mantle for a long tradition of black women, particularly those from the South, forcing Americans to look in the mirror of our professed ideals and to face…by
L. Lamar Wilson |
Nov, 2018

A Points South essay from our North Carolina Music Issue. After twenty-four years of educational experimentation and financial struggle, Black Mountain College closed in 1956. Today it is remembered primarily for its tremendous impact on the visual arts. Among the…by
John Thomason |
Nov, 2018

A Points South essay from the North Carolina Music Issue. Even with all the influences on his style and songs—Fred Miller, Blind Boy Fuller, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee, to name some—Henry had a large…by
Tom Rankin |
Nov, 2018

A Points South essay from the North Carolina Music issue. My hometown is just over an hour from Myrtle Beach, and so it was not unusual for people to make the pilgrimage to the Pad or the Spanish Galleon or…by
Jill McCorkle |
Nov, 2018

Track 20 – “Mill Mother’s Lament” by Ella May Wiggins; Performed by Shannon Whitworth Ella had grown up in the Smoky Mountains, first on farms and then in lumber camps, where she and her mother took in laundry while singing…by
Wiley Cash |
Nov, 2018

Notes on the songs from our 20th Southern Music Issue Sampler featuring North Carolina. The profiles, eulogies, and essays herein boast of remarkable achievements of North Carolina’s musicians across eras and genres: from unassailable legends (High Point’s John Coltrane, Tryon’s…by
Oxford American |
Nov, 2018

I’ve always been drawn to the misfits because they’re not beautiful, because they’re stinky, because people kind of hate them and dislike them. Essays seem perfect for this subject matter because they are so amorphous, and there’s a long essay tradition of cataloging the weird, going back to Montaigne and cannibals and Sei Shōnagon and “Hateful Things.”

You see one thing when you look at the state from a distance, but if you come closer, dig deeper, you always find something else. This probably has something to do with Disney World, but it also relates to the entire construct of Florida—the mythology of the state as a paradise preserved in time just for you.

Sometimes we go on journeys just for fun, and sometimes we go because we have to, even when it’s hard. In our third annual Southern Journeys summer feature, five writers travel far and near in search of understanding: about their personal histories and roots, about our neighbors and changing landscape. Lucas Loredo, a Texan whose family escaped Castro’s regime in 1960 on the second-to-last boat allowed out of Cuba, visits Havana and the town of Nicaro in an effort to heal a painful feud. On the Cumberland Plateau, Lisa Coffman trails an infamous historical fugitive as she forms an unlikely friendship born from a love for “the peculiar character of the land itself.”